Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into verse, grief into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined rejection to disappear.